Spidersilk.

I entered the following in Glimmer Train “Best Start” contest. The terms of the contest:

 

Best Start is meant to encourage new writers to tackle that story!

This category is different from our others in that the piece should be an engaging and coherent narrative, but it does not need to be a complete story; it needs to be an important part of a story in progress. You could think of it as a writing sample, but we hope you’ll feel free to reach a bit. Maybe you’re experimenting with a new voice, developing a character, working on clarity in a complex bit of plot or trying to make your dialogue believable and significant. You could be playing with point of view, working to build tension, or looking for a satisfying ending. Or you might be two pages into something brand new.

What we want is to read is an engaging slice of a story you’re excited about writing.

So here it is.

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Spidersilk

My walls are the color of a brackish pool in November: still, icy water reflecting a slate-colored sky. When I stand in the center of my room, the walls curve around me, silent and watchful, bare and smooth. They show nothing and they hide nothing. I like that.

From my view at the center, I can imagine the walls are comprised of just a single, mammoth piece of stone, as though my room was a bubble that welled up while it ran molten and then hardened into this perfect, cylindrical shape. But when I leave my room’s center and closely inspect the walls with my eyes and my fingers, my senses reveal miniscule fissures and bumps in the stone. Deep, perpendicular grooves outline the rectangular building blocks that went into the construction of my room. Every day I run my fingers along their rough surfaces, exploring each unique crevice. I marvel at the order of my walls—the perfection of their construction. They are an architectural mastery.

The stillness here calms my heart. My bed is canopied and majestic. The stiff, gray muslin quilt stretches taut across the smooth mattress beneath it. I sigh with contentment at night as I pull back the quilt and tuck myself between the sheets. When I awake from my dreamless sleep, only the patch of the mattress where my body lay in the night is disturbed. I extract myself again, replace the blanket, and smooth it out, and it is as though no one had been there at all. The chair of silver-white birch wood beside my bed is solidly made; it hardly creaks when I sit on its soft, pearl-gray cushion. Thick rugs of smoky-colored fur stretch across the floor and muffle the sounds of my bare footsteps. My presence here seems an afterthought; if I close my eyes and hold my breath, I can almost imagine myself disappearing within the silent expanse of my room. 

There are things here which unnerve me, however—disturbances to my calm. 

At the opposite end of the room from my bed and my chair, there is an ancient loom, with a basket of brightly colored yarn beside it. Every color the eye can perceive overflows from this basket, each unruly in its brilliance. Masses of gold, scarlet, azure, emerald, and ochre intertwine in a frenzy of terrible splendor. I am afraid to touch them. 

Beside the loom and the basket stands a large mirror. Wild roses of tarnished silver sprawl and snake around the heavy frame. The mirror is suspended from either side on twin hinges that attach to a single iron pedestal with clawed feet. This mirror is different from what mirrors should be. The function of a mirror is to gaze at one’s own reflection, but when I look into this mirror, I see only a deep, inky pool of purplish gray swirled with eddies of black. If I stare directly at it, this darkness stays static, but if I look away from it, out of the corner of my eye… there! I see movement on the mirror’s surface. I have not yet worked up the courage to touch it; I have a panicked vision that my hand will vanish beneath its watery face and my body would be drawn in after it with the destructive suction of a maelstrom. 

Above the loom and the mirror, a window is set deep into the wall. Its ashen shutters are closed and silent, offering no clue to what might be on the other side. They never rattle from a stray breeze or the knocks of passers-by. They are mute. At times, I sit on the chair beside my bed, feeling the slats bow just a bit beneath my weight, and I stare at this window far across the room. I cannot rid myself of the niggling desire to know what lies beyond. It sings in my ear like a whining mosquito.

Tear them open, fling them wide, then you’ll see the other side…

When these thoughts surface, a voice inside me shrieks in alarm. No! Curiosity is what troubled you before! It is what brought you to this place!

Is that true? I know not—for I have no recollection, none at all, where I lived before I was here. I know not who I was, or why I am here now. I only know the peace of my cool, stone walls and my smooth, clean bed. I only know the strange mix of fascination and dread that creeps inside me when I gaze at the mirror, the loom, and the window.

The spiders tell me to leave them be.

You are safe here, they whisper.

When did the spiders come? I was only me once, I know I was, but then they were here, as though they had always been. They are tiny, flitting things whose voices sound like rustling leaves in the autumn. Autumn… with its bright colors… unruly… not like the ordered wintry grayness of this room…

You are safe here, they repeat like a mantra. Safe, safe, safe with us.

“I am safe with you,” I repeat as they weave their sticky, glistening webs around my fingers. I am grateful to the spiders.

Love is everything.

In my last post, I wrote about my grandfather’s cancer and shared the poem I wrote for him for Christmas. Around February 12, after what turned out to be his last chemo treatment, my grandfather’s health began to decline dramatically. He became much weaker and ended up in the hospital. I called him there the week before last, around February 20. He didn’t seem to be doing well; he said he got worse every day. When I signed off with him, I told him I loved him, and he followed up with, “I love you too, dear.

My parents made the decision last Sunday (six days ago) to go down on Wednesday because things were not looking good. On Thursday night, my father gave me a call. What he said is best described by the e-mail that he wrote to friends and family that evening, which I will paste here.

My dear sister-in-law D. told me today that she visited Dad early Monday morning and had a conversation with him. She said he spoke like he was rehearsing what he wanted to say after G. & C. arrived Tues. and J. & I arrived Wed. He told her that he had figured it out. He went on to say that what was important in life was not the quantity of life, but the quality, and that his quality of life had been wonderful because of his family. Later he told the doctors that he didn’t want more treatment for his cancer. On Wednesday morning, he was sitting up and lucid when he signed the hospice papers, according to G. & C. By the time J. & I arrived Wed. afternoon, he was slipping in and out of wakefulness and hardly opened his eyes, so we never had that talk with him. Today he slept all day and didn’t eat. Late in the afternoon, a bed became available, and he was moved by ambulance from the hospital to the separate 12-bed hospice facility next door, a really beautiful place. We met with the doctor and nurses on day and evening shifts and they are all so compassionate and caring. When we left about 10 PM (Mom wanted to go home), Dad was again slipping in and out of wakefulness, and had been given some morphine and some nebulizer treatments to help clear congestion. His breathing has become labored, and we have said good-byes as we don’t know if he will last the night, but he may surprise us with by rallying (Dad the jokester – his final joke!). Good night Dad.

After my father’s phone call, I puttered anxiously around my apartment. Somehow, I knew my grandfather was going to go in the night. I was certain. As I drew a hot bath to calm myself, an idea for a poem lodged itself in my head. I ended up writing it as I sat in the bathwater, draped over the side of my bathtub, trying not to get the pad of paper wet. Here is what I wrote:

Goodbye
Sleep well, Grandpa.
Sleep peacefully.
Know that you sleep in our love.
We will keep vigil tonight,
Close by, or scattered between coasts.
We will wait with you
Until you are ready
To say your final goodbye,
To sigh and slip out of your skin
And rest.
You who have always brought us together as a family,
We honor you tonight
And we wait.
Good night.
Godspeed.
Take our love with you on your journey.
We will carry your love with us always,
And we will always miss you.

Writing this gave me a sense of peace. I went to sleep shortly after and slept soundly; I don’t remember any of my dreams.

The next morning at 7:15, my father called me. Again, what he told me is best described by this excerpt from an e-mail he wrote to family and friends later in the day, which I include below:

Dad passed away at the Hospice facility in Vero Beach today shortly after 5 AM, less than 12 hours after he was admitted. When we left him at 10 PM he was sleeping. I went to sleep at 11 PM at Dad & mom’s condo, but came awake at 3:30 AM. At 4:00 I called Hospice, as they said we could call anytime. They said his pulse was strong but he seemed to be declining, so I drove over and got there about 4:40. I held his hand and talked to him while he was struggling to breathe, until 20 minutes later his breathing slowed and then stopped. I’m so glad I got the “call” to come over and say goodbye. My older brother G., who was staying at brother D.’s house, said he came awake at 5 AM, not sure why, but probably receiving a”good-bye” too. We had a busy day making arrangements, but Mom is OK because we’re doing what needs to be done together as a family, which is what Dad would have wanted. Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers for my Dad and for us, his family.

I sent the poem I had written the evening before to my immediate family. With my permission, my dad forwarded it to many of our family and friends. My mother asked me if I would read it at the memorial service next Saturday… which I will. Even as I was writing, I knew in my heart it was my final gift to my grandfather.

Two of the people on my dad’s e-mail list who are hospice chaplains have said that the poem touched them; one wants to use it in her work sometime (with proper credit of course). Perhaps this final gift to my grandfather can be a gift to other people who are grieving as well. He would have liked that–being both generous of nature and proud of his progeny’s accomplishments.

The Foote family is not without its dysfunction. It has not been not without its tough moments that are best dealt with by sitting back, biting your tongue, and tossing back a drink. But I realized yesterday, when I couldn’t stop crying for the whole morning after I heard the news, that those moments don’t matter as much as the love that binds our family together. It is largely because of my grandfather’s efforts that I know my cousins, aunts, and uncles so well; despite living in different states, we went on extended family vacations virtually every year of my life. We forged extremely precious inter-family bonds… which, when you get right down to it, is what matters most in life.

A very wise friend of mine told me yesterday, “Love is everything. You are loved, and your grandfather was loved and able to love in return. That is what makes our lives worth living. I believe that if we live our lives in love, and honor the memories of those who have gone before us, then they are always with us.” She is right. So I give this final gift to my grandfather, a small thing in return for the enormous gift of love he gave us and our family throughout the years.

Goodbye, Grandpa. I will always miss you.

Fighting dragons.

This Christmas, my dad’s side of the family (there 14 of us now, including spouses and seriously significant others) was supposed to go to Hawaii, courtesy of my very generous grandparents. Back in January, my grandparents had rented condos in Maui for 2 weeks over the 2008-09 winter holidays. It was supposed to be the last hurrah, so to speak; my grandmother is 84 and my grandfather is 82, and they were very cognizant at that time that they might not have all the time in the world.

As lousy luck would have it, my grandfather came down with lung cancer this year. He had surgery for it back in May, but it spread nonetheless and he was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer in September. He was still determined he was going to go to Hawaii with the family over the holidays and has been on chemo ever since. The chemo was somewhat effective in slowing down the disease, but not effective enough that would make it possible for him to travel thousands of miles. He finally gave up the trip in mid-November, so instead of Hawaii this Christmas, there are 14 of us spending the week down where they live in Vero Beach, Florida.

My grandfather is bound and determined that he’s going to beat this disease, despite the dismal odds. For his entire life, he has pulled himself up by his bootstraps and succeeded by virtue of his intelligence, his will, and his hard work. He’s not giving up that easily. His original goal was Hawaii, but now it’s June, when my cousin’s baby is due. The first great-grandchild is definitely something to shoot for.

This Christmas, I felt the urge to write a poem for him. It’s kind of a family tradition, my poem-writing; I started composing poetry for whosever name I got in the Secret Santa draw when I was about ten years old, and have been keeping it up pretty much consistently since then. I cringe when I think about most of my early efforts, but my family has always been a good audience, and let’s face it–most people like having poems written about them, even if they are mediocre. It’s the thought that counts.

This year, it took me a while to come up with a poem for my grandfather. I couldn’t decide which tack to take. Talk about the cancer, or not talk about the cancer? Talk about the past, or the future? Not to mention the fact that I would end up in tears every time I tried to sit down and write.

I thought about rhyming poetry, maybe a pretty sonnet to go with the one I wrote my grandmother and that she still keeps on the dresser in her bedroom, but I ended up with free verse. In any case, he still liked it. My grandfather’s name is George, so I thought the dragon metaphor was apropos for him. I thought I’d offer it here with the idea that maybe someone else suffering from cancer (or from anything else life-threatening, or even just really difficult) might find some resonance in the metaphor. After all, we all have dragons to fight, and we all could use some comfort.

Fighting Dragons

Standing in the chill of a misty dawn,
garbed in heavy armor,
you wait for the dragon.
You hold your sword in one hand,
shield in the other,
and proudly display the bright colors of your family crest.

Now, you had heard tell of dragons.
Their stealth, their speed.
But in the prime of life, who has time to worry about them?
There is family to create,
memories to be made,
people to love and protect.

But eventually, inevitably, the dragon comes.

At first, it makes itself at home while you are away,
leaving scorch marks on your favorite cushions
and ominous messages on the refrigerator
in gothic, scrawling script.
Just to let you know it’s there.
Crafty creature. Audacious. Insidious. 

Does it think that you will wait,
meek and frightened, a tiny mouse in terror of its claws?
You could.
“The dragon has come at last,” you could say. “I can do nothing.”

But you will not.
Courageous and determined, 
you don your armor,
your sword in one hand,
your shield in the other,
and ride out to meet it.
You stand in the chill of a misty dawn,
your weapons heavy as stone.

But as you wait for the dragon,
clutching your blade, 
the people who love you
who have spent their lives loving you
surround you
wrap their fingers around yours
help you grip your sword
and bear your shield
and we say to you: 

“You are not alone.”

For Grandpa
Christmas 2008

With love,
Beth 

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley: A Review.

This originally appeared as a guest post here.

When I finished reading Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown, I was distressed. The story of Lady Aerin, who transforms herself from the feared and marginalized daughter of a king and a Northern “witchwoman” to a slayer of dragons and savior of her kingdom drew some eerie parallels to the draft of a novel I wrote during the course of my graduate work in creative writing. Both characters are princesses; both are only children; both have flame-red hair; both have a special mental “gift”; both must test their mettle and prove themselves fit to rule their kingdoms.

At first I felt a stab of despair–what could I do better and more originally than what Robin McKinley has already done with so much mastery that it earned her a Newbery award? And why didn’t I read The Hero and the Crown back in elementary school like everyone else so that I wouldn’t have bothered with writing a novel that had clearly already been written? I felt like an unoriginal hack.

But once the panic attack subsided, I was able to see things with a little more perspective. I work with fairy tales and fantasy, which is a genre that has been very well-traveled throughout the history of the written (and heck, oral) word. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still ripe for exploration. There is a reason that people revisit the fantastical realms: they resonate with us. They fascinate us. We love to imagine ourselves in Once Upon a Time, fighting our own dragons. Fantasy is far removed from our daily experience, yet so often psychologically close to it. It’s chock full of archetypal imagery. The key to working with already established fantastical themes successfully is putting your own unique spin on them–for you are a unique person, with a unique voice, and a unique view of the world, and you have a story that only you can tell.

McKinley achieves this kind of originality brilliantly in The Hero and the Crown. She sets it in an intricately drawn but fairly standard fantasy world of sword and sorcery and high adventure surrounding the coming-of-age story of her main character, the outcast child of a king. But McKinley takes this well-traveled trope and casts the main character as a girl–and not just any girl, but a girl who does traditionally masculine things, like slaying dragons and fighting on horseback, while retaining her emotional vulnerability. Long before there was Harry Potter with his lightning scar defeating Voldemort and the forces of evil, there was Lady Aerin Dragon-Killer wielding her magical Blue Sword to defeat every enemy threatening her father’s kingdom and earning her place as ruler of the kingdom through her strength, bravery, and will. We love Lady Aerin for her bravery, but also for the love story between her and her friend Tor. She is sympathetic and feminine without giving up any of her strength and agency–a revolutionary idea for the time, and even (sadly) sometimes for today. This now-classic story of feminine power remains an inspiration for girls. Perhaps it set the stage for other coming-of-age adventure stories of strong young women that I loved so well growing up. I may have missed reading The Hero and the Crown when I was young, but I read stories like it, which in turn may have influenced me to write my novel of similar theme two decades later. We are, after all, the sum of our experiences. I am the writer I am because of what I have taken from all I have read and loved throughout my life.

So perhaps the question I should be asking myself is not “How can I do better than McKinley?” but “How can I tell my story the best way that I know how?” Truth be told, even though my story shares some superficialities with McKinley’s, the two stories seek to discover different things. Time will tell whether the journey I write for my heroine’s coming-of-age will be a story that people will be hungry to hear. I can only hope it will be–and also, every night before I go to bed, I can kneel on the floor and say the magic words, “I am not a hack… I am not a hack….”

Hey, at least it’s worth a shot.

Two Dreams.

I had a dream that you died
And I carried your body to the burying ground.
Your face was turned away from me
But I knew it was gray, drawn, and lifeless
And I wept.

Then you came alive again
Twisting in my arms
Eyes wild with return from nothingness
But how that made me feel
I can’t remember.

****************

A Year Later

I dreamed you were the one I used to know,
The one with the bit of my soul tucked away.
We stood in the green place where souls wait;
You winked, and waved, and turned from me,
Jumped into the next body.
I jumped too.
I knew we would find each other.

But you let life make you ugly,
Your core twisted.
You hurt me, yourself, and everyone you loved
And I was so sad.
I waved goodbye.

I wake up against my new lover’s back,
Feel his even breathing
And I know you missed your chance.
I love him in this life.
You’ll have to wait until the next–
If I want you then.
Now, I know I am happy
Without you.

Inspiration in popular culture…

Does anyone else think the song “Walking on Air” by Kerli is just begging to be inspiration for a horror story?

Here is the video.

Here are the lyrics.

Keep the channel open.

People keep blogs for many different reasons. Some like to rant (and argue) about politics. Others like to keep in touch with distant friends. Some want to share the details of their lives with anyone who will listen, chronicling both the difficult and joyous aspects of their lives in the hopes that they might find solidarity in their experiences. One of the beautiful things about the internet and blogging is that people can reach out and find communities in ways that were impossible even a few years ago. It allows you to shout into the proverbial Void to anyone who will listen; and sometimes it’s amazing who will listen.

I’ve never written a blog before that was intended to be entirely public, so I apologize if I’ve already begun to ramble. I’m sort of stumbling over my words here, figuring that maybe if I just stall long enough, some kind of purpose in this introductory entry will come to me. That’s how my writing process tends to work: I often have no idea where I’m going in the beginning, and it takes a while for me to take the first plunge. But once I’m in there, the icy, swirling waters of typing one key after another, a focus usually comes. Now that I think about it, the process of my life has been kind of like that, too. It’s easy to get so afraid of jumping off the solid, safe places that you shuffle your feet at the edge for a while before you finally get the courage to jump in–or slip on loose rocks at the edge and just fall in, screaming and flailing. (Also known as pinkie-swearing with one of your friends while you’ve had a number of drinks that you’re going to send out some writing every other month, no matter how scared you are. Oy.)

I guess I’m starting this blog to try and figure out who I am as a writer, to perhaps chronicle my writer’s journey, and to gain the courage to actually try to succeed as a writer. Here’s what you need to know about me. I’m a native Midwesterner who went to a small liberal arts school and now lives in New England. I finished up my MFA in Creative Writing in January 2007 and have since been working in events coordination as my “day job.” I’ve wanted to be a writer and to publish my work for as long as I can remember, but so far, I’ve been pretty unsuccessful with that. And by unsuccessful, I mean I have polished very few things enough to get to the point where I have the courage to send them out. So at the moment, the only actual publishing credit I have to my name is a fiction story I wrote in college about subatomic particles that my professor put into a book along with several dozen other students’ work. I’m not going to tell you the name of the book, because it was a story I banged out the night before it was due, and besides, all the characters have alliterated names like “Paul Proton” and “Penelope Proton” and I’m just too mortified.

I suppose in this introductory post I should tell you about the title of my blog and what it signifies to me. It refers to a line from Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott”, now immortalized by singer Loreena McKennitt:

Four gray walls and four gray towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle embowers
The Lady of Shalott.

I am compelled and troubled by this poem. In its entirety (and it’s pretty long) it depicts a woman who weaves beautiful, magical tapestries alone up in a tower. She has a magic mirror where she sees the sights of the world and uses them as inspiration for her enchanted weavings. But she lives the lonely artist’s life, dedicated solely to her art. In fact, she bears a curse of unknown origin, so that if she looks down through her window upon the real events of the world, “the curse” will come upon her. This kind of existence makes her very sad and lonely. When she sees a pair of lovers through her mirror, she aches with longing at what she does not have (“I’m half sick of shadows,” she said).

Enter Sir Lancelot–she sees him riding through the images of her mirror. So beautiful is he that she dares to look down to Camelot, and thus the mirror “cracked from side to side.” The curse comes upon her (what curse it is, we are not told) and she goes down to the river, finds a boat, writes “The Lady of Shalott” along the prow, gets in, sends herself down the river, and dies–of the curse? Of a broken heart? We still don’t know.

She washes up on the shore to Camelot where the whole court sees her and is terrified of the spectacle. But not Lancelot:

But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, “She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace
The Lady of Shalott.”

I like to think that the path of one dedicated to her art does not require shunning of all earthly concerns. As a writer, one must find a balance of living in the world as well as somewhat apart from it enough to write about it objectively. The idea of living in a tower alone, dedicated to one’s art, is a tempting metaphor; the term “ivory tower” doesn’t come out of nowhere. But we have to write from living life and drawing from our experiences; it’s the only way to write authentically, and to write in a way that will resonate with others. This poem distresses me because it doesn’t offer the heroine a space between. If she dares to take risks and to live life, she is doomed to die. I like to think that as writers (or, more broadly, artists), we can create in our towers and draw from our experiences, which become distilled, transformed, and more powerful through the magic mirror of our imaginations. I like to think that looking down from the tower to reality, or even descending and walking the world a while, will not kill us. But the poem reminds us when we experience the world, when we put our hearts out there, we run the risk of having experiences that make us feel like we want nothing more than to lie down in a boat and die of a broken heart. I have certainly felt like that. And you, gentle reader (to borrow a term from Jane Austen), likely have, too. It’s finding the balance, surviving the heartbreak, going back up to our four gray walls and finding the courage to use the experiences for inspiration that makes us true artists–and makes us truly alive and filling our place in the world.

I’d like to close this entry (which apparently has amounted to a pep talk to myself) with a quote that depicts one aspect of being a writer: that grim need to write that is not so much a joy to do, but leaves an emptiness if not done.

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening
That is translated through you into action,
And because there is only one of you in all time,
This expression is unique.

If you block it,
It will never exist through any other medium
And be lost.
The world will not have it.
It is not your business to determine how good it is;
Nor how valuable it is;
Nor how it compares with other expressions.
It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly
To keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
You have to keep open and aware directly
To the urges that motivate you.

Keep the channel open.
No artist is pleased.
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction;
A blessed unrest that keeps us marching
And makes us more alive than the others.”

–Martha Graham to Agnes Demille

And finally, words of wisdom from Goethe:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, do it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Hello, my name is Beth. I’m pleased to have you with me on my journey. I hope we can be good friends.